A group of MIT students wrote a computer program capable of creating "random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations." They then used this program to create a paper that they submitted to an academic conference: the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, which sounds like a thrill a minute. The paper was accepted, which isn't really surprising since as the students point out conferences such as this are really 'fake' conferences "with no quality standards, which exist only to make money." The students hope to travel down to the conference (if they're still allowed to attend) and deliver a "completely randomly-generated talk."

If you've been to any academic conferences, or tried to read many academic journals, you'll swear that most of the content is ramdomly generated.

I remember once my graduate school convened a panel discussion on how to get published in journals. Suffering, as usual, from a terminal lack of tact, I stood up and said, "Isn't it true that many of these journals have few or no readers, and that if professors didn't need to publish in order to get tenure, they wouldn't exist at all?"
To my amazement, none of panelists denied this claim (all the panelists were editors of, and major contributors to, academic journals). One of them offered the justification that, "At least my articles will be there in the university libraries if anyone in the future should ever want to read them."

Posted by Big Gary C in Dallas, Texas on Fri Apr 15, 2005 at 03:17 PM

I printed these out and interoffice mailed them to my boss, with a postit on them reading "Brian, your thoughts?" and signed the CEOs initials.

Posted by UsuallyDark in Glendale, CA on Fri Apr 15, 2005 at 10:05 PM

I want to know if they actually get to talk at the convention. It would be funny to see what they represent. Kind of like the Yes Men thing that got the Republicans earlier.

Posted by Dave H in Santa Monica on Mon Apr 18, 2005 at 04:43 PM

If he hasn't allready seen it, I'll print off a copy and give it to a know-it-all at school.